Socialist Alternative, an Australian
socialist organisation, denies that a genuinely popular revolution, let alone a
socialist revolution, ever took place in Cuba from 1959 onwards. It seems Socialist
Alternative believes in miracles: the Cuban state “is a product of a revolution
carried out by a few hundred or, at best, a few thousand guerrillas". The
decisive role of an extensive urban
popular movement
in the overthrow of the US-backed Batista dictatorship simply vanishes from
this account. “There was
no 'forcible entrance of the masses onto the stage of history', to borrow Trotsky’s
description of revolution". In other words, the Cuban Revolution is a myth.
It was just Fidel Castro and a few hundred or a few thousand guerrillas.
Indeed, “what
is striking” — to Socialist Alternative — “about the Cuban Revolution is the
general lack of self-activity
in the revolution itself either by workers or peasants”.

The
millions-strong demonstrations in support of the revolutionary government
throughout the past five decades; the mass literacy campaign in which thousands
of young people left their classrooms, lanterns and textbooks in hand, to eradicate
illiteracy in 1961; the half a million Cubans who volunteered to serve in
Cuba's internationalist mission in Angola and Namibia; the outpouring of solidarity
after each hurricane that passes over the island; the neighbourhood committees that
organise blood donations, guard duty, recycling, attention to the needs of
vulnerable children, the elderly and the infirm; Cuba's untiring and selfless
contribution to health care, education and sports programs in small, poor
countries such as Kiribati and Tuvalu that are all but invisible on the world stage
— none of this registers with the comrades from Socialist Alternative. Or
perhaps they are ignorant of these deeds.

The
revolution, or the "revolution" as they see it, is not the work of
millions of ordinary women and men who have given of themselves, sometimes even
their own lives, to make Cuba what it is today. All this is the work of what Socialist
Alternative describes as the “Cuban ruling class”, and they're not talking about the octogenarian Cuban-American
bourgeoisie in Miami. They're talking about a creature of their own
imagination: a ruling bureaucracy in
Cuba
like that of the Soviet Union from Stalin to Gorbachev. Given their dogged blindness to
the reality of a deeply popular revolutionary process in Cuba and their
inability to perceive the crucial distinction between bureaucratism and a
ruling bureaucracy, it’s not surprising that Socialist Alternative is unable to
grasp the class essence of the debates and changes underway on the island
today.

Debate on the Guidelines

"The
Cuban Communist Party (PCC) finally held its sixth national congress on the
16-19 April. This congress, the first since 1997, was convoked to allow the PCC
leadership to obtain endorsement for a whole plethora of changes to Cuban
economic policies. Unsurprisingly the conference endorsed the 311-point reform
package unanimously." That the nearly 1,000 delegates to the PCC's sixth congress
voted unanimously to approve the final draft of the Economic and Social
Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution is not surprising, but Liz
Walsh doesn't explain why.

The Guidelines
approved by the congress were the culmination of a years-long process of public
debate and consensus-building initiated by Raul Castro in July 2007, when he
called for structural and conceptual changes to Cuba's model of socialist
development and invited Cubans to debate the country's problems and propose
solutions, repeatedly urging a free and frank debate without false unanimity. The
draft Guidelines published in October 2010 were
based on this mass consultation process carried out in late 2007.

Between
December and February the PCC leadership again called on Cubans, both party
members and non-members, to debate the draft Guidelines in their workplaces
and study centres, neighbourhoods and in PCC base committees. Total attendance
at the 163,079 grassroots debates was more than
8.9 million in a country of 11.2 million people. Two-thirds of the original 291
guidelines were modified on the basis of the public
debates, as well as the December session of Cuba's National Assembly of
People's Power (parliament), the provincial and municipal committees of the Communist
Party and the deliberations of the five PCC congress working commissions.

The
unanimity of the final vote on the Guidelines at the sixth congress was not
a reflection of unanimity; the delegates would not have agreed with every word
of every guideline, as seen in the televised debates during the congress in
which not all the votes on proposed amendments were unanimous. Rather, the
unanimous vote was a reflection of delegates’ confidence in the process of
drafting, debating and amending the Guidelines.The only principled basis for a delegate to vote down the
Guidelines would be if they disagreed with the overall direction of the
changes proposed in the document. They would then have been obliged to propose
an alternative set of guidelines for adoption by the congress. Since no such
alternative document emerged during the process of elaborating the Guidelines,
it's not surprising that the final vote was unanimous.

The
delegates were not hand-picked by the PCC central committee. They were elected
from the party base in the municipalities.

Walsh is
silent on all this. She continues: “These changes to
the economy, as always, are being driven from the top, in particular by Raul
Castro." It's true that the national debate was initiated by Raul Castro
and that the PCC leadership is driving these changes. So what? Isn't this what
leadership is all about?

Under the heading "No democracy in Cuba",
Walsh dismisses the popular debates as nothing more than window dressing. "[S]ome
defenders of the regime disagree and point to the fact that there has been
widespread consultation of local party branches and neighbourhoods. But
consultation is not the same as democratic control, far from it." Walsh
fails to grasp the reality that Cuba is not, and could not possibly be, a fully
communist society in which the distinction between a class-conscious vanguard
of the working people and the mass of working people —from which flows the
historical necessity for a vanguard party of the socialist revolution — has
withered away. Without a Marxist-Leninist party at the head of the Cuban
Revolution there would be no revolution and none of the impressive social
achievements that even Walsh does not completely ignore in her commentary.

The important question is not whether 11 million
Cubans were summoned to vote on each and every guideline to satisfy Walsh's
utopian (in Cuba's conditions) conception of a "real" socialist
democracy. What's important is (a) whether or not the content of the Guidelines
coincides with the class interests of the working people in the concrete
conditions of Cuba today; and (b) whether or not the PCC leadership modified
their proposals on the basis of the popular debates to improve this document in the class interests of the working people,
that is, to what extent they were able to involve
the masses in the process of elaborating this document. On both counts the facts
speak for themselves. By the time the final draft of the Guidelines was
voted on by the sixth congress delegates in April it was no longer just the PCC
leadership's document, it was a document of Cuba's working people and their
political vanguard organised in the PCC.

Walsh disagrees: "This consultation really
only amounted to an exercise in testing the water to see if there was going to
be substantial uproar. Indeed there was avalanche of criticisms at these
meetings, helping to delay the implementation of some of the cuts." The
fact that the Council of Minister's initial timeline for the first round of
state-sector employment rationalisations was scrapped, a decision that
reflected the concerns expressed by workers in the debates on the Guidelines,
illustrates my point about the PCC leadership listening to the people. If the
PCC leadership were as cynical as Wash suggests, why would they bother with a
consultation process at all? Why bother "testing the water to see if there
was going to be substantial uproar?" Why not do what capitalist
governments routinely do, just ram through unpopular changes and confront the
people with riot police on the streets? Walsh's cynical dismissal of the PCC
leadership's efforts to strive for a genuine consensus on what must be done to
renew Cuba's socialist project just doesn't add up.

"For all the consultation, there is no
mechanism for these discussions to be binding in any way on any of the ruling
state bodies", Walsh declares. According to Socialist Alternative's
utopian, anarchist pipe dream of how they imagine socialist democracy should
function in a poor Third World country besieged by imperialism, Cuba's
socialist state should dissolve itself into the grassroots debates. Not at some
point in the distant future with communism on the horizon, but now. This is
kindergarten Leninism, detached from the real challenges faced by Cuba's
revolutionaries today — among them the PCC leadership — in striving to deepen Cuba's socialist democracy.

"What’s more there was no mechanism for
individuals to put forward an alternative program to the regime’s, let alone
organise a cohered political opposition to the reforms. The Communist Party
after all is the only legal political party in Cuba. Organising any political
current outside of and in opposition to the party is illegal." I can see
where this is going. Socialist Alternative, who equate proletarian democracy
with bourgeois democracy, would like Cuba's socialist state to lift the ban on
opposition parties.

"While Cuba is no North Korea or Burma, any
open political opposition to the regime is carefully monitored and frequently
suppressed. The regime attempts to intimidate dissidents by threatening to sack
them from state employment, by monitoring their homes day and night, or by
organising ‘repudiation meetings’, where vigilantes are bussed in to surround
dissidents’ homes to yell insults, throw objects etc. Or sometimes political
opponents of the regime are imprisoned. Today, it is estimated that there are
still over 200 political prisoners in Cuba’s jails, the great majority of these
jailed for activities of an entirely peaceful political nature."

Walsh evidently doesn't keep up with developments
in Cuba: as of May 5, when her commentary was published on the Socialist
Alternative website, most of these so-called political prisoners had been
released following discussions between Raul Castro and the head of the Catholic
Church in Cuba. More importantly, Walsh does not tell her readers about the crimes
for which these "dissidents" were charged,
convicted and imprisoned: accepting money or payment in kind for collaborating
with US agents in Washington's efforts to organise a pro-capitalist opposition
movement on the island as a step towards carrying out an Iraq-style "regime
change". Whether or not such activities are peaceful, Cuba, like every
state, has laws aimed at protecting its national sovereignty. Collaborating
with a foreign power bent on imposing its economic and political system on Cuba
is considered a serious crime. The truth is always concrete, said Lenin, but
not for Walsh.

Neoliberalism
or socialist renewal?

Turning to Walsh's analysis of the content of the Guidelines
and changes in this direction that are already underway, she claims that these
reforms involve "implementing a neoliberal program of rationalisation,
slashing state jobs and winding back welfare programs to achieve what some of
the regime’s supporters on the international left have called a more 'efficient
socialism'. On top of these cutbacks, the Cuban state is trying to provide
greater openings for small private business and foreign investment."

Presumably if Walsh and her Socialist Alternative colleagues
were running a socialist state they would not aspire to a socialist-oriented
economy hampered by chronically low labour productivity, endemic theft and
petty corruption and a host of other serious problems, such as the persistence
of a cumbersome and divisive dual-currency monetary system and universal
subsidies other than free health care and education that reinforce, rather than
reduce, social inequality by allowing households with higher incomes to
purchase subsidised rationed goods. That's because such an economy cannot raise
living standards, reduce social inequality and be the material basis for the
building of socialism.

Cuba's economic problems — a consequence of the US
blockade, two decades of the harsh post-Soviet "Special Period"
crisis and mistakes made over the past five decades — cannot be solved within
the framework of the existing "model" of socialist development which
is a patchwork of obsolescence, erroneous ideas and much else that is of
enduring value. What is needed for Cuba to pull itself out of the Special
Period and resume the building of socialism is nothing less than a new model of
socialist development characterised by, among other things, a different balance
of social, cooperative and small-scale private ownership and management of
productive property and thus a greater role for the market with the framework
of the planned economy; the decentralisation
of economic management from the ministerial to the state enterprise and
municipal levels to reduce the administrative apparatus to a minimum and allow
greater scope for workers’ participation in decision making; and a reassertion
of the role of wages, rather than universal state subsides, as a means allocate
access to goods and services — other than the right to free health care and
education and subsidised sports and cultural activities enshrined in Cuba's
socialist constitution — according to Marx's formula
for the transition period: "to each according to their work".

According to Walsh, "the centrepiece of the
current economic reforms is the slashing of state sector jobs. The figures are
quite dramatic. Raul wants to slash around 1.3 million ‘excess’ workers from
the state’s payroll over the next five years. That’s 20 per cent of the
workforce. In a speech that smacked of neoliberalism’s emphasis on ‘personal
responsibility and hard work’, Raul Castro declared his determination to ‘erase
forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can
live without working’. Indeed this speech sounded eerily similar to one [Australian
Prime Minister] Julia Gillard recently delivered about the need for welfare recipients
in Australia to learn ‘a new culture of work’.”

The figures are indeed dramatic and there's no
denying that this is a wrenching change in a country accustomed to the state
providing all citizens with a job. But Walsh does not contextualise these
figures. First, all Cubans enjoy free health care and education, social
security and subsidised access to sporting and cultural activities. Most
households own their homes and rents are capped at 10% of household income. For
the time being, some basic consumer goods are highly subsidised and distributed
via egalitarian rationing. Second, as a consequence of the Special Period
economic crisis, a substantial proportion of the state-sector workforce no
longer depends on wages or salaries as their primary form of income but on remittances,
tourism tips or supplementary black-market activities often linked to workplace
theft and corruption. Third, Cuba's licensed self-employed enjoy the same
pensions and other benefits, such as paid maternity/paternity leave, as the
rest of the workforce and tend to earn higher incomes.

Taken together, this means that losing one's job in
Cuba cannot be compared to losing one's job in a capitalist country where the
"free market" determines such things as access to housing, health
care and education. As for Raul Castro's notion that Cuba is the only country
in the world where one can live without working, this is not quite true: it's
only the working people, the vast majority of people in capitalist societies,
who cannot live, or live decently, without working. In socialist-oriented Cuba,
where the parasitic bourgeoisie has been expropriated, there are essentially
two kinds of social parasites: corrupt functionaries and Cubans who are
perfectly capable of working but who choose not to because they can live
relatively comfortably on remittances or illicit incomes linked to theft from
the socialist state.

The PCC leadership is leading the struggle against bureaucratism
and corruption. The implementation of the economic reforms outlined in the Guidelines
involves dismantling much of the bloated administrative apparatus of Cuba's
socialist state, reducing this apparatus to a minimum and widening the scope
for democratic accountability and decision making by the producers.

Bureaucratism

Internally, that part of the administrative
apparatus that is resistant to change and unwilling to give up its
administrative prerogatives and, in some cases, illicit privileges is the main
obstacle to carrying through the necessary and urgent reforms. The real dynamic
of the struggle in Cuba today is not the PCC against the working people, but
the revolutionaries in the PCC together with the class-conscious majority of
the working people against bureaucratism and other forms of social parasitism.

As for those Cubans who are of working age and are
capable of working but choose not to, if Walsh wants to defend the
"principle" that work is optional in the transitional society, she'd
better explain why Marx was mistaken when he insisted, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, that other than
universal rights such as (in Cuba's case) free health care and education,
distribution must be based on the principle "to each according to their
work". She doesn't even have to read Marx. Commonsense tells us that it is
both ethically unacceptable and economically unviable this side of communism —
achievable only on a global scale and on the basis of profound changes in both
the level of development of the productive forces and the social awareness of
individuals — to allow some people to opt out of making a labour contribution
to society if they are capable of doing so.

Walsh criticises the gradual elimination of the
ration book without mentioning that those in genuine need of subsidies will
continue to receive them. Given the social differentiation that has emerged
during the Special Period, and the need to accept a degree of social inequality
based on individuals' or work collectives' labour contribution to society, the
social welfare emphasis must shift from universal subsidies to subsidies
targeted to those in need of assistance. Walsh also glosses over Raul Castro's
insistence, in the Main Report
to the sixth PCC congress, that the rationing system would be eliminated
gradually in step with economy recovery: "No member of the leadership of this country
in their right mind would think of removing that system by decree, all at once,
before creating the proper conditions to do so, which means undertaking other
transformations of the economic model with a view to increasing labour
efficiency and productivity in order to guarantee stable levels of production
and supplies of basic goods and services accessible to all citizens but no
longer subsidised."

According to
Walsh, "those who enjoy positions of power within the state
bureaucracy have always had access to consumer goods". It's not clear what
she means by this. If she is implying that public officials in Cuba have
privileged access to consumer goods on the basis of their legitimate
employment, this is nonsense. Cuba is not like the Soviet Union from Stalin to
Gorbachev, where the nomenclatura
enjoyed exorbitant salaries and perks such as fancy cars, country estates and a
network of special stores with luxury goods. Of course, to carry out their jobs
effectively some officials get driven around, travel overseas frequently and so
on, and there may well be instances in which some such "privileges"
are unjustified. If Walsh is talking about illicit privileges linked to
corruption, it's true that corrupt officials enjoy privileged access to
consumer goods that are out of reach of most Cubans thanks to their illicit
incomes. What is the attitude of the PCC leadership at the helm of Cuba's
socialist state to such instances of corruption? As I pointed out earlier, the
PCC leadership is waging a tenacious struggle against corruption and the Guidelines
are an implicit declaration of war on what many Cubans call "the
bureaucracy".

Walsh notes that "a key element of the
economic reform program is the growth of the private sector in Cuba. The government
hopes that some of the ‘excess’ 1.3 million workers will be absorbed into this
sector. Raul has already made available 250,000 new self-employment licences. The
government is relaxing laws that forbid small businesses hiring and exploiting
workers other than family members. In other words, the Cuban regime is trying
to create a legal petty bourgeoisie for the first time since 1969, when it
nationalised all small businesses."

There are two factual inaccuracies here. The
nationalisation of small businesses
occurred in March 1968, not 1969, and involved only non-agricultural small
private businesses, not Cuba's peasant farms. She continues: "The
government is also proposing to absorb 200,000 workers into the co-operative
system. This will mostly mean that the government will hand over small
state-run firms, like beauty parlours and barber shops, to the workers. By
making them into co-ops, the state no longer has responsibility for their operation
or for paying the workers’ salaries. They hope these workers will be driven by
economic necessity to work harder and increase their own rate of exploitation.
Many of these co-ops will fail or, to balance the books, they’ll be forced to
reduce their own wages or eliminate jobs."

Most leftists would welcome the move to encourage
the establishment of a non-agricultural cooperative sector in small-scale
production and services. Yet Walsh tells us that the evil PCC

leadership must be gloating at the prospect that
"these workers will be driven by economic necessity to work harder and
increase their own rate of exploitation". Cooperative members may well be
obliged to work hard and produce quality goods or efficient services. That's
life. But how the members of a cooperative, who decide collectively and on an
equal basis how the earnings of their enterprise are allocated, can
"increase their own rate of exploitation" Walsh doesn't tell us.

For Marxists, exploitation
is an unequal social relation in which one person or some people exploit others
on the basis of their ownership of means of production. In a cooperatively
owned or a state-owned, cooperatively managed enterprise in a post-capitalist,
socialist-oriented society, who is doing the exploiting?

Walsh concludes her commentary: "Therefore,
the current economic reforms being embarked on in Cuba do not represent a
transition from socialism to capitalism. Cuba never ceased being a capitalist
society. Rather, the Cuban ruling class is attempting to deal with their
economic problems by modifying their state capitalist economy."

There is only one true statement in this muddle of
theoretical confusion, intellectual laziness, prejudice and ignorance: the
current economic reforms being embarked on in Cuba do not represent a
transition from Cuba's socialist-oriented society back to capitalism. At least
we can agree with Walsh on something.